Press Clips / Contact Info / Bio

Press and Contact Info

To contact Janice MacDonald regarding media interviews, radio and TV availabilities, or appearances at conferences and book events, please send an e-mail toinfo@janicemacdonald.net.

For other queries, and to ask Janice questions about her novels, please visit our interactive social media pages on Facebook, Twitter, and Goodreads, where Janice enjoys chatting with her readers to discuss books — her own and those by other authors. Just choose a social media platform and click one of the the icons at the top left of this page.

An extensive list of media stories about Janice and her work, with links, appears after the biography below.

Janice’s Biography

Born on the side of a mountain in Banff National Park, the daughter of a cowboy from southern Alberta and a schoolteacher who herself had been born in a pioneer log cabin in the Peace River Country, Janice considers herself to be an example of the quintessential Albertan, at least till an election rolls around. Brought up by her mother, she attended a French private school with uniforms (and without boys) for her early years, which is likely why her kids have French names and her mom had so few grey hairs. She then hit a public high school and made up for lost time.

Writing was always a passion, though she sang in choirs and high school musicals and dragged her guitar to coffee houses and open stages in the late ’70s and early ’80s. Although she long ago realized that being an opening act was as far as she was ever going to get, she remains a strong member of the audience at concerts and festivals. Instead, radio writing, playwriting and eventually prose took the foreground. With a BA and two books under her belt, and married to a peripatetic postgraduate scientist, Janice returned to school to obtain an MA (on Parody and Detective Fiction), thinking that teaching in the college system would be a nice portable career. Two daughters and a divorce later, she put it to use, teaching English literature, play analysis, creative writing and business communications to over a decade of freshmen at the University of Alberta and Grant MacEwan College. She also wrote a college textbook, a children’s Hallowe’en story and began the first mystery series set in Edmonton.

While pursuing her own writing career, Janice also served in a variety of leadership and mentorship roles for other writers from Alberta and across Canada. She was a member of the board of directors for the Writers’ Guild of Alberta (WGA) from 1989-1990 and President of the WordWorks Society of Alberta from 1996-1997. Janice’s longtime service with the Canadian Authors Association (CAA) at the provincial and national levels included a stint as President of the Alberta Branch from 1993-1996, during which time she co-chaired two national conferences and created/developed the Exporting Alberta Award, which is still awarded annually. At the national level, Janice served as the CAA’s National Vice President for Awards from 1995-1997 and as the CAA Fiction Award Manager from 1995-2005. Janice continues to mentor writers by teaching at workshops, conferences, Blue Pencil events with the WGA, and writing camps such as YouthWrite and JustWrite.

Always a precocious child, Janice became known in her thirties as an “early adopter” and was delighted to explore the explosion of social media: bulletin boards, alt.nets, chat rooms and international Internet communities. This was how she met her husband, Randy Williams, who is originally from Alabama, but arrived in Alberta via Cape Canaveral, Micronesia, and Massachusetts.

Janice eventually resigned herself to the reality that she was never going to get a full-time position in a university and quit the gypsy life of sessional teaching for a steady position with the Alberta Public Service. She now plies her organizational expertise and writing skills for the government from Monday to Friday and continues to write the Randy Craig mystery series (currently published by Turnstone Press) on weekend mornings.

A dyed-in-the-wool Edmontonian, Janice makes no apologies for setting her novels in a recognizable Edmonton and celebrating the things that make this northern metropolis so vibrant and unique. Randy Craig finds work in various aspects of academe and walks the not-quite-so-mean streets of Alberta’s capital, finding herself enmeshed in puzzling murders and drinking far too much coffee.